USPS Logs All Snail Mail For Law Enforcement 324
The NY Times reports on a program in use by the United States Postal Service that photographs the exterior of every piece of mail going through the system and keeps it for law enforcement agencies. While the volume of snail mail is dropping, there were still over 160 billion pieces of mail last year. "The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping." This is in addition to the "mail covers" program, which has been used to keep tabs on mailings sent to and from suspicious individuals for over a century. "For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests. The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public."
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad this is coming out (Score:5, Insightful)
A public debate about blanket surveillance and the meaning of the 4th Amendment is long overdue. The more dirt comes up all at once, the harder it will be for the public and Congress to ignore.
There are really two possible outcomes: either Congress gets off its ass to rein in this kind of BS, or the American people actually admit they don't mind being spied on by the government (and there's a spike in emigration from the US to Europe).
Re:They take photos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
"It has long been held by US courts that the exteriors of letters and other items sent through the mail are not considered private."
Irrelevant. Systematic collection of public information can legally (not to mention morally) constitute "surveillance" and an invasion of privacy. Have you ever heard of stalkers? I've had people stalk me. Why would you give the government a pass or stalking when you wouldn't tolerate it from anyone else?
"It makes sense that they are allowed to photograph and record them for later use."
It makes sense to them. It doesn't make sense from a citizen's perspective. And guess which is more important?
"I mean, did you really think that a piece of mail sent through a government controlled organization would be hidden from law enforcement?"
Again: there is a very big difference between information simply being "public", and a systematic collection of that information. The courts have recognized this.
"... but still not really a big deal."
(Sound of loud buzzer.) Ehhhhh... sorry. That's not quite the answer we were looking for. Perhaps you'd prefer to live in Cuba?
Re:They take photos? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the box your penis pump came in?
All your vitamins and supplements ordered online?
The point is not everyone WANTS THE GOVERNMENT TO HAVE DATA ON EVERY BIT OF THEIR PRIVATE LIFE!
It is people like you with the blase I dont care when someone is shoving a baseball bat in your ass that are helping the plutocracy ruin this country. Your complacence makes me ill.
Re:They take photos? (Score:4, Insightful)
So put it in a fucking envelope.
Seriously, who expects privacy with a postcard????
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: HIGHLY ILLEGAL (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but haven't you got it yet? They are ABOVE the law, every law, everybody's law. And nobody can do diddley squat about it, though there will be buckets of pious lip service paid, with the requisite crocodile tears and lots of hand wringing. Most people have already forgotten about all this NSA stuff, after all there's all sorts of exciting circuses on TV and just look how much bread we get at Walmart! C'mon, sit back, and EAT, and WATCH, and EAT, and... You'll soon feel happier.
Just get used to being pwned like the rest of us have.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing sadder than our govt's secret slide into an Orwellian police state is that if they had just asked for the permissions, the public likely would have said no problemo! sigh.
Re:Not a big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
If I send a letter, I don't expect the outside of the envelope to be private, fair enough. If I drive down the street I don't expect my license plate to be private. If I walk down the street I don't expect that to be a private act. What I do expect to be private is the records of all those actions going back months and years. This isn't just a matter of degree, there is a fundamental difference between any single action being public and a log of every action I've ever performed being private.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Do i really need to explain how the 4th should be preventing the USPS from turning over logging records EN MASSE to law enforcement?
They're only photographing the *outside* of the mail, which, in TelCo speak, is the metadata and is also clearly in "plain sight". I'm not taking a position on whether this is "right" or "wrong", but I don't see how it's currently illegal. Personally, I've always assumed the US mail was (somehow) tracked and recorded, just like with UPS and FedEx.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
The 4th what? Surely you don't mean the 4th amendment [umkc.edu]? After all, that amendment protects against unreasonable searches, which is completely unrelated to the issue at hand.
The Fourth Amendment's protection of "papers" has never applied to the external surface of mail. The outside of mail must be read by the USPS for the service to function, so when you drop a letter in the mailbox, you're implicitly giving the USPS permission to read the visible surface. To my knowledge, there has never been a law preventing the USPS (or any other courier, for that matter) from reading anything visible from the outside. If the surface of mail is particularly confidential, it's not "unreasonable" to expect the mailer to put it in a plain outer envelope.
Busy, busy, busy (Score:4, Insightful)
If the USPS was smart, they'd sell stamps that say exactly this; they'd be in the black by Christmas.
Re:They take photos? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with keeping logs forever is that you may be boring today, but what if you aren't tomorrow?
Laws change. Governments change. 20 years from now who's to say you won't offend some politician who will then say "find me something in this man's history that we can maliciously misinterpret as evidence of a crime". That sort of thing has happened for centuries. The only defense is to limit the amount they have to work with.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
It's no longer a secret slide. They are going to an Orwellian police state, in plain sight.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wondering why there are still any unsolved major crimes. The government has access almost all of your communications. And if you have a cell phone they have a record of where that cell phone travels.
Because criminals have suspected that "the government has access almost all of your communications" even if they didn't have express proof. The only communications that have ever been monitored (excepting throw-away phones and dead-drop mailing) have been law-abiding citizens who would never have thought to suspect that they were being monitored (and thus did nothing to obfuscate their communications).
As someone else mentioned in another thread, this doesn't seem to solve major crimes, so it doesn't seem to be about solving major crimes. At best, minor crimes (except they don't meet the level to warrant a warrant, so really at best it's a waste of money). At worst, it's a handy way to gather data about political opponents even if that was never the intent (corruption and abuse happens; preventing tools like this from being abused is important enough to dismantle the tools themselves).
Re:They take photos? (Score:5, Insightful)
They know the sender and the recipient. That gives them just enough information to get you into trouble. For example, you may order from a chemical company, an electronics company, and a Islamic book store, and their software may flag you as a potential terrorist because everybody else who has received packages from these three companies has been. Now you face endless interviews when you try to travel, restrictions when you try to get a government job, etc. It doesn't even matter that what you actually ordered was completely harmless.
And if some prosecutor gets it into his head that you really are a terrorist, out of the millions of bits and pieces of information about you, he can then pick out exactly those that fit his theory: "In addition to those suspicious packages he received, he made five postings to Slashdot expressing anti-government sentiments and saying bad things about the president. For the past five months, he has had breakfast in the same IHOP as another foreign terrorist suspect 17 times, and we believe they were using the soap dispenser to pass clandestine messages. Etc." If they have enough data on you, they can certainly enough to convince a grand jury, and either blackmail you into making a deal, or even win a case.
Having lots of data on people is intrinsically dangerous, even if you think you have nothing to hide and have committed no crimes.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
All of this surveillance of US citizens' phone calls, postal mail, internet communications, law enforcement video monitoring in public spaces, etc.; and yet somehow the Boston bombing still happened! And supposedly it was done by a couple of kids fully connected into "the grid", who were persons of interest to the FBI, and not super-spies.
I see only a few possibilities. Either all this surveillance is useless against anyone, or the Boston bombing was an inside government job.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
The bill of rights is very largely about limiting what the federal government can do. Even if it says that it is totally unconsititutional for the government to do X, there won't be an accompanying constiutional clause against non-government entities doing X, and there may be no laws passed against non-government entities doing X either. A lot of us think that the constitution explicity saying the "Federal Government can't do X", damned-well means "the Federal Government can't spend tax dollars on getting a private entity to do X for them", either. But when we try to open public debate on this, we seem to have to deal with people who are aguing that there is no actual law, just that pesky, trivial, no-big-deal Constitution. Your post reads like that. Sorry, but the Constitution is a bigger deal than all the specific laws the Federal government passes, and not the other way around.
The problem is that law got overtaken by tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Now with technology, massive storage, and automated scanning, this *all* changed. They can keep the name of destination/senderfor every mail. Collate the data. And if they wanted, say which package you got from whom, which letter, who do you write often, etc...
And that was the "exterior of the letter has no privacy implication" is terribly outdated and alson terriibly wrong : you could now have a pretty good picture of what and whom from a person do order, and whom she is mailing to, and with which frequency. That has implication of privacy *because* of the collation and easy availibility of the data, since it is not anymore a sets of random human not seeing the whole picture, but a cloud of machine with a database havign a very precise picture.
So since now somebody back decades ago did not see the implication against privacy of letting "just the exterior of the envelop has no expectation of privacy", well now your snail mail will say much more about you than some might want to wish. If you are fine with that, be aware, that not everybody is.
Frankly I do not care but I can see why some folk would not be happy.